


a little solace and peace

by breeeliss



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Pidge-Centric, a steady and slow dip into voltron fanfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 00:48:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11325201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breeeliss/pseuds/breeeliss
Summary: Pidge knows what it’s like to lose most of what you call yours and find yourself flung into space to fight a war you might not win. It’s not the time to want things that are silly and wish for things that won’t happen. But Lance knows that she deserves it.//for priya





	a little solace and peace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rhapsodyinpink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhapsodyinpink/gifts).



> first voltron fic and sorta shitting my pants about it but hey, we'll see how it goes. 
> 
> mainly inspired bc a friend cheered me up yesterday and now im here to cheer her up today. hope you like it!

Pidge cut her hair for Matt.

Sweeping her hair into the trash can, stealing Matt’s old frames, and becoming Pidge Gunderson was a manifesto to herself — a single-minded promise to bring her family back to her no matter the distraction, no matter the cost to her, no matter how long it took. If she ever lost sight of that promise, all she ever needed to do was look in the mirror, squint her eyes, let the edges of her reflection blur and soften, and wait until she saw Matt staring back at her, telling her not to give up.

So perhaps, on the outside looking in, it does seem rather ridiculous for her to be tearing her room apart, looking for a knife or some scissors to take to her hair after looking in the mirror that morning and seeing Katie — Katie who was letting her hair grow out too long, Katie who needed to remember Matt, Katie who made a _promise_ — but this is all she has of him anymore. A worn photograph and his blurred face staring back at her in the reflection of her paladin helmet.

When she finds nothing, Pidge heads to Lance’s room because if there’s anyone who cares more about what stares back at them in the mirror every morning, it’s him.

He’s wiping off the last bits of his facemask with a towel when she opens the door, and he barely has time to ruffle her hair and spit out a dorky greeting before the words are flying out of her mouth, “I need to borrow a pair of scissors.”

Lance blinks at the volume and speed of her words, but looks back into his room — covered in facial products, old Altean lounge clothes he’s repurposed into robes and pajamas, gifts inhabitants from other planets have given him over the past year — and says, “I’m pretty sure I have some around here somewhere. Why, what do you need them for?”

Pidge swallows. “I just need them. Just for five minutes.”

Lance merely shrugs — it’s not the first time Pidge has asked her teammates for weird things to aid in whatever pet project is keeping her distracted that day — and invites her in, letting her sit on his unmade bed while he rummages around his drawers and produces a small pair of scissors that don’t look very sharp but will probably do the job just fine.

He takes the edge of his shirt to wipe the blades clean, but right when Pidge thinks he’s going to hand them off to her and leave it at that, he beckons her to the bathroom attached to his room. “Come on, get in here already. Breakfast is gonna be served soon, and I don’t want Keith stealing bigger portions again.”

“Wait, what are you doing?” she asks.

Lance smirks and points to his own head. “You need a haircut, right? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a beautician or anything, but I know an uneven cut when I see one and it’s been bothering the crap out of me since day one. I’m practically begging for you to let me even it out for you.”

Pidge frowns. “How did you know that I — ?”

“I mean, it’s obvious it’s getting longer,” Lance explains. “But you keep yanking and touching it like it’s annoying you. Plus I know how anal you were about keeping your hair short in the Garrison.” When Pidge doesn’t move, he grabs her wrist and walks her to the bathroom. “Come on, I’m not gonna fuck it up, I promise.”

As she’s sticking her head in the sink to wet her hair, Lance tells her that haircuts used to cost too much money back home, so he just learned to trim his hair himself to save the cash for the things he needed. He’s ridiculously thorough about it, going so far as to throw a spare towel over her shoulders and spin her around in the stool in his bathroom like she’s in a barber’s chair. Lance turns her so that she’s facing the mirror, strokes his chin, and walks around her stool completely. “So. What are we going for here? Rihanna? Miley Cyrus? Kristen Stewart? You’d look chill in an undercut, but I don’t think there are any shears in space. God, that’s such a shame. You’d be the most badass looking one out of all of us.”

Pidge smirks and adjusts the towel. “Just….how it looked before is fine.”

“How it looked before except _not_ like your ends went through a food processor, right?”

“Fuck you, my hair didn’t look that bad.”

“Por dios, Pidge, _language!_ And I love you, but you can’t cut your hair for shit. But don’t worry. Lance is here to take care of you. I won’t even charge you for the wash.”

Pidge rolls her eyes at him, but keeps her head straight as she lets him work. It’s gone to her shoulders in the months that she’s left it uncut, and Lance immediately cuts across just short of the length he wants before he pinches her hair between his fingers and cleans up the ends. Lance is rarely quiet — he’s all too big smiles, too loud voice, too much soul that fills the room like sunlight pouring in through a window — but with the exception of his occasional humming, he works on Pidge’s hair in complete silence. She lets herself close her eyes to the sound of his snipping and moving around her, trying to remember the last time someone had gently turned her chin, brushed her shoulders clean of hair, accidentally grazed her ear with their finger. She can’t quite find the moment, and it reminds her how long she’s been gone.

He’s leaning away from her and occasionally making small snips to make extra sure that he’s leaving her hair even when he says, “You’re like the spitting image of your brother, dude.”

Pidge smiles softly and gently moves a wet strand of her bangs out of her eyes. “Yeah. The two of us got that a lot. If you put our baby pictures side to side there’s legit no difference. Used to freak everyone out.”

“Oh my God please tell me you took tests for each other and stuff.”

“He’s older than me, you idiot, that would’ve never worked,” Pidge chuckles. “Although, I’m pretty sure we dressed up as the Hitachin Twins for Halloween one year.”

Lance tips his head back and cackles. “Anime twins! _Classic!_ Please tell me you have pics.”

“Plenty. They’re all at home though,” Pidge says, and she doesn’t say anything more. She doesn’t want to promise Lance that she’ll show them to him when they get home because the concept of going home seems so far removed from them now she doesn’t want to go injecting false hope where it might do more harm than good.

Lance pulls a comb from his pocket and starts brushing through her short strands. She looks in the mirror and already starts to feel more like herself. “It’s tough, huh?” he asks.

“I just hate not knowing,” Pidge explains. “I know mom is at home and she’s safe even though she’s not here. But Dad and Matt….there’s a whole universe out there, Lance, they could be anywhere. And there’s no way to know for sure short of just carving through every planet and ship we find and hoping they’re there.”

Lance is done with her hair, using the towel to dry the ends and brush any last cut pieces off her shirt. “They’re closer than you think,” he promises. “You don’t have to look that far or for that long. They’re gonna come back to you soon.”

“You don’t know that,” Pidge replies. “Like, you actually don’t. None of us do.”

“I don’t have to _know_ it. I can _feel_ it,” Lance explains. “I’m going off my gut here and it’s never failed me before.”

“Your gut convinced you to flirt with a girl who tried to trick you into her planet’s weekly fertility ritual. I still do not forget what those fertility tents looked like, Lance. The crap we went through to save you…”

“ _Okay_ ,” Lance says loudly, his cheeks warming in embarrassment. “So it’s not right all the time. But it’s right about the important things and this is important. This is all temporary, Pidge. Trust me. Besides, my mom always says ‘ _a mal tiempo, buena cara.’”_

“What does that mean?”

“Means put a good face to the bad times. When shit goes south, stay positive. Good attitude works wonders. And no matter what you think, I’m gonna have a good attitude for you and rub all the karma your way because I’m that generous.”

Pidge rolls her eyes. “You’re a regular humanitarian.”

Lance chuckles and puts his face right next to Pidge’s so that they can look at her hair together. He nods in approval and knocks his head with hers. “You know. Undercut or not, you’re still the most badass looking one out of all of us. I did a pretty good job.”

“It’s definitely not bad,” Pidge agrees. She smiles at him through the mirror. “Thanks. Even though I could’ve done it myself! But still, thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Lance winks back. And then, quite out of nowhere, he shocks her by kissing her.

It’s just a quick one on her temple, and Lance treats it like it’s just as natural as if he’d just high fived her or ruffled the hair on the top of her head. Pidge wants to say something but he’s already turning around to put his scissors and towel away, and Pidge doesn’t want to blow up something that seemed so miniscule and superficial to Lance. But Pidge feels that entire side of her body warm up with one shocked shiver before mellowing out into a lingering warmth that demands an explanation but has none. On the other hand, this was Lance, and Lance tended to do things on the fly just because and for no other reason. It was possible that this was just another one of those times.

Her fingers reach up to the temple still holding onto the ghost of Lance’s lips against her skin, and she looks down at the ticker in her pocket. “Thanks again, Lance,” Pidge speaks up, trying oh so hard to sound casual and hoping she does the job. “Hurry up. Breakfast is probably on already.”

* * *

 

Pidge accepted long ago that being in space meant that there are things she won’t ever get to do now. Or at least, not anytime soon.

She won’t finish school and get that trip to Disneyland that her mother promised her as a graduation present. Despite the crash course on piloting she’d gotten this past year, she won’t learn how to drive — like actually sit in her brother’s old Subaru and stop short at stop signs, accidentally run over garbage cans, and complain about being too short for the pedals. She’ll never get invited to shitty house parties or have her first drink with Matt or finish that computer she was building or get a normal first kiss.

Pidge learns that when you’re in the middle of a war, there’s no clear end in sight, and it’s possible that she’ll be fighting and searching for a very long time, all while her life hangs precariously in the midst of battles that could quite literally kill her. But Pidge accepts this just like everyone else. Everyone has things that have been taken from them — things they’ll simply have to learn to live without or replace with whatever can be crudely fashioned out of parts scrounged from an existence spent in a castle flying light years away from home — but they put it aside in favor of picking up their weapons and pledging their lives to protecting an entire universe.

It makes no sense to wish for those missing things. They’re gone, and Pidge focuses on the now. She won’t go home without her brother and father. She won’t go home without fulfilling her duty to her team because they matter, they’re hers now, and she has to protect them too. But Pidge still feels herself _wanting_ them despite that logic, and it makes her feel sick with guilt.

Lance is the only one who makes it known just how much he misses the little things he’ll never get to have — unapologetic in the way he wishes for comfort and simplicity but valiantly picks up the sword he never asked for in the first place. Lance tells everyone how much he wants to feel wet sand between his toes, take long drives along the coast, and dance salsa at family parties until his feet are sore. Even when they were in the Garrison together, Lance never felt guilty for being selfish.

Pidge’s first night in the Garrison — after their first failed flight simulation, after hacking the Garrison files led to no answers, after she stared at her photo albums for hours and felt the back of her throat aching from the effort of holding every sob and scream back — Lance found her curled up against the wall of her bunk, hugging a pillow to her chest, and staring at the walls while sleep continued to elude her.

Lance had snuck plates of food out of the mess hall to bring back for her because she had missed dinner. He left them by the desk next her door and sat cross legged by the edge of her bed, eye level with her tear stained face that she was too lazy to hide from him. “Homesickness?” he asked.

She promised she wouldn’t reveal anything personal to her crewmates. She was there to work, not get personal. They didn’t know about Matt, about her father, about her research into the Kerberos mission. But Lance wasn’t _wrong_ , so she nodded and hid her face in the pillow when just that simple confession released a dam of frustration that even Pidge was too small to temper.

Lance rubbed her back and squeezed her shoulder while she silently poured tears into her pillow case. “Yeah, man. I feel. It’s tough being away from home. Pretty sure I cried like a baby my first night here because I came back from dinner in the mess hall and nothing tasted like home. I mean, granted this school food is kind of crap, but you get my point.”

“They feel far away,” Pidge rambled, forgetting that she wasn’t supposed to be making anyone privy to her thoughts, wasn’t supposed to distract herself from what she went there to do. “I can’t get to them. And I hate that it gets me like this.”

“I mean, it’s not perfect, but there’s always FaceTime.”

Pidge snorted and felt herself cry harder, because if only it was that easy. She’d kill to see their faces even if it was through a spotty cell reception. But of course Lance doesn’t see the irony that she sees and just keeps rubbing her back, which is oddly more comforting than Pidge would’ve figured.

“It’s okay to cry, you know,” he told her. “Like screw not being manly or being a baby about stuff you can’t change. You’re allowed to be sad about something even though it won’t change anything. Sometimes sitting and being sad helps to just get it all out.”

Lance is annoying when he complains, is annoying when he’s overly dramatic about little things, but when she stops to think about it, Pidge knows why he does it. He knows that sometimes you just need to sit there and complain about how unfair everything is — just to ease the ache and let everything unravel and breathe — before you picked up and started from where you left off again. Feeling the controls of her lion in her hands makes her feel like she has to grow up impossibly fast, pretend that she’s unbothered and focused. But Lance makes her guilt melt away and makes her feel like it’s okay to sit and pine for something simpler.

He sat with Pidge for hours that night at the Garrison, resting a hand over her forehead and kissing the back of it before he slipped out while she was still only half asleep, hoping that she woke up feeling a little bit better and reminding her to eat. Back then and now, Lance’s unspoken words always reach into her heart with a sincere reminder.

_Feel for yourself. Cry for yourself. Hope for yourself. Want things that are silly and wish for things that won’t happen. You deserve it._

* * *

 

It’s amazing how quickly a routine mission made to sound so simple can turn into a complete fucking shitstorm in five minutes flat.

They’ve gotten into the routine of wiping clean the computers in every abandoned Galra base they find on the off chance they can pluck out any names, coordinates, or scraps of mission logs that might be useful to them. Any little bit helps when your mission is basically to liberate an entire universe from an alien race. Hunk, Keith, and Shiro were meant to scope the base for lingering soldiers or survivors while Lance covered Pidge as she wiped their drives clean.

Except their plan manages to fail spectacularly when the alarms to the base start blaring the moment Pidge hooks up her computer to their systems. Suddenly Keith is screaming into the comms, saying that the bay doors won’t open and they’re cut off from their lions. Pidge is at the Galra computers, pulling up their code, running it through her computer, and quickly forcing her brain to come up with an override for the bay doors. But the realization that this is most certainly an ambush doesn’t come until Galra start pouring into the communications room, and a self-destruct beacon set for ten minutes is echoing through the base.

Lance is already at her back, his blaster pumping continuous fire into the chests of all the drones that are rushing them from all sides while Pidge tries to disable the self-destruct program. It’s just walls and walls of codes and commands that seem much more complicated than your standard Galra defense system. She knows it’s been rigged specifically for a trap like this, and it’s _brutal_ to break through. Pidge is running scripts and ripping down firewalls only to find that she’s sifting through endless layers of pure numbers and it feels like she’s not getting anywhere. There are seven minutes left, Lance is still shooting, Shiro, Keith, and Hunk are trying to blast open the bay doors, and she realizes she _needs more time._

This is her thing. This is what Pidge does. Her teammates depend on her to be able to run the numbers, think quickly, let her mind run a mile a minute, and get them out of tight spots like this. So far she’s never failed, and it’s literally saved their lives. But every algorithm Pidge tries fails, and the countdown screeching out every thirty seconds is making the numbers mix up in her head and making her brain trip over her thoughts. She’s gritting her teeth and mashing her fingers down hard on the keyboard, as if this will all make the scripts run faster, make her thoughts run more efficiently. But then she hears Lance scream out in pain as a well-aimed shot singes the side of his thigh and he cripples into a heap against the control panel.

“Pidge,” Lance mutters, sounding calm for someone who’s got a leg bleeding out on the floor and is wincing through every pull of his trigger. “How are we looking?”

Pidge is shaking her head, and she can feel her fingers trembling. “I’m….I-I’m trying. But this is like breaking out of fucking Alcatraz.”

“Don’t worry, Pidge, you’ve got this,” Lance encourages, leaning over her to shoot down a drone coming up on her right. “You always do.”

Yes, she always does, because this is her thing, this is what she’s supposed to be doing, and she’s not allowed to fail at it. She can’t fail her family, her friends, the universe, things are too dire for that. But there’s five minutes left and they’re about to die and she still can’t override the security and damn it all she can feel tears pushing against the backs of her eyes because she’s _trying_ and it’s not fucking working.

Lance must see the turmoil on her face because his gun is on the floor and he’s grabbing Pidge’s shoulders to turn her towards him and cup her cheeks in his hands. She’s only barely aware of the wave of Galra soldiers briefly ceasing and giving them a moment of reprieve but Pidge’s mind is still running numbers, desperately pushing through for a solution.

“Hey, hey, look at me,” Lance is muttering and she has to work hard to drag her eyes up to meet his. “Breathe. In and out. Okay?”

“I don’t have time,” she’s mumbling, her thoughts sprinting and tripping right out her mouth. “It’s taking too much time, I’m doing everything I can, but I can’t do it in enough time, I’m not gonna finish and we’re all going to — ”

“Don’t you start doing that, Pidge,” Lance implores, pressing his forehead — slicked with sweat and blood — to hers.

“I can’t think Lance there’s no time to think because it’s not working!” she shouts at him, furious because he can weave all the pretty words that he wants but he doesn’t understand.

“Listen, listen to me,” he tells her, and his fingers are drawing circles on her cheeks and it’s grounding and she prays for it to help. “You’re allowed to screw up. You don’t have to breeze through this, you’re not perfect. But I know you and I know you can do this if you just….breathe. Please, breathe.”

He fills his chest with air to show her, and he’s not satisfied until Pidge is pulling in a breath through her nose and releasing in a shaky sigh. Lance nods in satisfaction, smiles, and presses a kiss to her forehead just as more Galra drones are marching down the halls towards them. “You’ve got it. I know you do.”

Lance is turning back to the drones, limping into position and staying in one spot to help him pivot around and not further injure his leg. Pidge doesn’t understand how he does that — how he’s bleeding from his leg and still managing to defend her even when he’s not entirely sure that they’re going to get out of this. It’s as if he has full faith in her but has already forgiven her if it turns out it’s just too much, and it shouldn’t be fair for someone to just be able to have that much blind faith in things that he can’t predict. But Lance is fighting for her and her teammates are rooting for her and she’s got four minutes to make this right.

His calm clears her head and the kiss he left on her skin feels like it sinks into her brain and invigorates it with purpose. Because suddenly she has an idea, and it’s an abysmally stupid one, but if she can nail it they’ll be able to get out of here in time. It’s a complicated stream code that she’s only ever tried once on Galra computers like this but it’s a beast of an override if she can force herself to remember it all. It takes her minutes to type in and she’s only got seconds left by the time she sends it and hopes that it breaks down what it needs to. Her heart is pounding and she’s sweating on the back of her neck as she waits for it to go through.

There’s only four seconds left on the countdown when it finally sputters out and the bay doors downstairs fly open. Pidge grins from ear to ear as she pulls out her bayard and helps Lance take out the last several drones still in the room with them, seeing the exhaustion that’s slowing him down. Once the last drone fizzles out into a hunk of metal on the floor, Pidge runs to Lance and wraps one of his arms around her shoulder. “Okay. Come on. You’re losing way too much blood and we need to get out of here.”

Lance chuckles, limps with her out of the comms room, and grips her shoulder tightly. “Knew you could do it. That’s all that matters.”

* * *

 

Pidge waits outside of Lance’s healing pod even though Coran promised it would only take an hour or two for him to be all fixed up. The wound on his leg was easily patched up and the blood loss was easily fixed with more food once he managed to get out.

But Pidge stays because she owes it to him. Not just for snapping her back to herself today or shooting down literally dozens of drones through his pain just to keep her safe, although it’s mostly for that. But Lance puts too much of himself into others to not have someone meet him halfway, even if it’s something as simple as waiting for him to stumble out of a healing pod and give him some food and lead him back to his bed.

It’s not the first time this occurs to her, but someone like Lance doesn’t deserve to be in space away from the people who love him, deprived of all the love he deserves and doesn’t get enough of in the middle of a literal war. In reality, none of them do, but Lance especially seems so out place here, looks so wrong sitting injured in a healing pod only to come out and have to repeat the process again when the chance calls for it. Lance cares too much. Pieces of him are missing and he still finds enough of himself to cut up and hand to others because he has so much damn love to give to people he doesn’t even owe that kindness to. He deserves to get it all back and Pidge knows that, to a point, it’s impossible for the universe to pay him back in return for it.

So Pidge stays. Because he's a goof that speaks in memes and sneaks up on her when she has headphones in and liked to lean his elbow on her head because he finds it funny how short she is. Because he didn’t even _know_ her all that well when they first met and still managed to let her know that he understood and was there to give her his kindness. She's sure that Lance doesn't see that as a strength of his, but Pidge is starting to realize how much it breathes life into their team and into her. It isn’t her forte — she doesn't deal in unknowns unless she knows exactly how to arrive at them — but Lance deserves it.

She owes it to him. So she stays.

It’s exactly an hour and a half when the healing pod slides open and Pidge catches Lance as he trips out of the pod and groans from the vertigo. “God, I hate those things,” he mutters.

“Wouldn’t know,” Pidge smirks. “Keith tells me they’re freezing, and Hunk says he just feels claustrophobic the whole time. I feel like I’m the only one who hasn’t hopped into one of those things.”

“And it’s going to stay that way if I can help it,” Lance says.

Pidge rolls her eyes. “That’s not an invitation for you to get shot to hell just to save my neck.”

“You make it sound like a chore,” Lance winks, but ignores her glare and tests out his healed leg. “Jesus, I’m starving. Please tell me you’ve got some space goop.”

Pidge reaches down to the floor where her bag is and hands him a bowl of food. “Gorge down, my friend. Coran says you’ve gotta keep eating since your blood pressure basically plummeted back there. Thanks for almost dying, you idiot.”

“Ah, I didn’t almost die, it was just a bloody leg,” Lance shrugs, talking with his mouth full. “Besides, gave you time to save our asses, so is it really a loss?”

“That’s literally the definition of a loss.”

“Eh, details. We’re all safe so it doesn’t really matter, right?”

Pidge sighs and starts to lead them out the medical bay. “Well. It was almost for nothing. That base was a total bust. Their computers were already wiped when we got there. Guess they’ve been catching onto how we’ve been getting intel.”

“Typical,” Lance mutters. “This is a good time to bring up my double agent idea to Allura again.”

“We’re not doing that,” Pidge deadpans.

“I’m just _saying_ ,” Lance insists with a smile, “we paint Keith’s face purple and get him to pull some 007 shit on a Galra ship and we’re in business.”

“Yeah you go tell Keith that. Maybe he’ll let you narrate his theme music in the comms while he’s on mission.”

“You think!?”

“Lance, shut up,” Pidge laughs.

The rest of the team is resting after their stressful mission, but Lance has been resting for hours in the healing pod and Pidge keeps terrible hours most of the time anyway. So she brings them into one of the comms rooms on the ship and spends an hour finally hooking up the video game that they bought from the Space Mall to see if they can get it up and running. It took Pidge, Hunk and Coran as a collective to figure out how to make the connection between the ship and the old console compatible through some clever wiring and a few upgrades to the console itself, but she finishes off the adjustments and grins when Lance cheers at the menu screen that shows up.

It finally feels a little bit like they’re just sitting in Pidge’s basement and playing video games on the weekend. They’re at it for ages and in between levels Pidge stares at Lance’s face to see him practically beaming at finally getting to have a tiny taste of home, even if it’s something silly like a video game. It’s times like this when she notices how his eyes sometimes get too big and too bright and realizes that this is how she wishes she could feel all the time — a carefree kid with her parents and her brother back on Earth with all of her friends where everything is simple and doing stupid things doesn’t have consequences like it does here.

It’s unrealistic, but Lance pulls enthusiasm from the air and makes Pidge believe that one day this will all be over, and they’ll be able to return home safe and sound and finally have the normality that’s owed to them. She owes him for that.

“Thanks for today,” she says as they’re skipping through the narration on the bottom of the screen as the story progresses. “I mean, having my back like that. I appreciate it.”

Lance turns to her with a shocked look on his face, but quickly allows it to melt away into a smirk. “You don’t have to thank me. Like I wouldn’t totally go and do it again.”

“I know. But you still don’t have to. And you do anyway. I just want you to know that I’m grateful for it, alright?”

Then Lance does something strange again — he takes her hand, rubs his thumb across the backs of her knuckles, and presses a quick kiss there. Like the kiss at the Garrison. Like the kiss when he was cutting her hair. Like the kiss when he was bleeding on the floor and begging her to focus on what he knew she could do. Quick, casual, like he didn’t even have to think about it before he knew that it felt right. Lance, the showoff, won’t even let her thank him without showing her up in a show of affection that she doesn’t even know how to comprehend.

He turns back to the game and Pidge decides to do the same, suddenly feeling like there’s a scale that they’re both standing on that Lance has unfairly weighted towards his side. They’re staying up late and laughing through the video game and acting like normal teenagers….and she owes him.

* * *

 

They’re sitting alone in the kitchens and having a late breakfast after sleeping in the next morning when she kisses him on the cheek.

She counts how long it lasts — as long as Lance’s first three put together — and doesn’t pull back until all the time is added up into a perfect balanced equation. Lance stops in the middle of lifting his spoon to his mouth and looks a little bit like a gaping fish, and Pidge suddenly doesn’t know why she even did that. But she’s learning that dealing with Lance is often an exercise in being comfortable with the fact that things don’t always have to make sense.

He blinks at her. “What was that for?”

Pidge shrugs and doesn’t look down at her food to avoid his gaze. She owns it because fair turnabout and all that jazz, and she tells him as much. “Payback. For all the kisses you’ve ever given me, and I’ve been noticing them.” Really, it’s for everything else that’s happened since they met, but that's not something she can make her mouth produce. Pidge works in numbers and evening out equations, and she tells him that this is just adding more mass to her side. 

Lance chuckles and leans closer to her. “You don’t have to do that. I wasn’t doing it and waiting for you to even us out.”

“I know you weren’t,” Pidge nods. “But you deserve to be paid back for it anyway. Although I’m not sure why you’re doing it.”

Lance leans his chin in his hand. “Can you guess?”

“I don’t know,” Pidge frowns. “To make me feel better?”

“Sort of,” he grins. “I don’t know I guess….you’ve gone through enough crap, you know? And I guess….I guess it just seems important for you to know that there’s someone looking out for you and making sure you’re happy. It’s not my job or anything, but I want to do it for you. Because you’re….well you’re _you_ , you know?”

No. Pidge doesn’t know. All she knows is that his kisses don’t feel like the times when Shiro hugs her and lets her rant about Matt, when Keith quietly sits with her and knows exactly when words just aren’t good enough, or when Hunk and her buckle down and make a list of all the human food they’re going to eat when they get back home. It feels deeper and it feels poignant in a way that she doesn’t expect from Lance. She knows that it’s all these things because it’s difficult to understand. It doesn’t tease itself apart in discernable pieces and it feels like there’s something he’s trying to tell her that she simply isn’t seeing. And Pidge can’t stand it when she has evidence that doesn’t neatly fit together into an explanation for her, and the only way to solve that is to get more proof.

So Pidge leans in and kisses him again, this time closer to the edge of his mouth and she _feels_ it. Can’t explain it or put a word to it or understand it for the life of her, but it feels too heavy and too filled with things for it to be just something to make her feel better. Lance is closing his eyes and turning his head to face her when she pulls away again. She sees the blush on his face, his big eyes full of love to give, and then it all comes crashing into her because now she’s so close and he’s letting himself be vulnerable. Everything that she needs is so clearly written on his face.

Then Pidge remembers she’s a girl stuck on a spaceship for the foreseeable future, and there are things she still wants to do.

So she stays. She waits for him to finish leaning in, finish shutting his eyes, finally kissing her full on the lips — gentle, uncomplicated, but enough to make her heart feel full with something that it had been deprived of for a very long time. It’s short, and her head doesn’t spin, and it doesn’t feel like everything is different and nothing will ever be the same. It feels like things have sharpened, because now she knows that Lance doesn’t do things just to do them. He’s frenetic but intentional, and everything was always going to coalesce and come back to this. Sitting together at the kitchen table, floating in space, not sure what tomorrow was going to bring, hoping for things they wished they could have back, and putting a good face to the bad times.

They laugh when they break apart, and the air feels sweet and light and like all the things Pidge didn’t think she’d be able to grab back for herself for a long while.

It’s nice. They deserve it.


End file.
